Enlightening and enthusiastic ... Offers an expansive history of the epic’s reception as it was interpreted and then put to use ... A writer like Reade offers not commandments for living but interpretations for analysis, and if that seems less authoritative then that’s precisely the point.
Paradise Lost can still be illuminated — and, indeed, illuminating — if we approach it with care, and What in Me Is Dark shows us how ... This book-by-book approach could easily become dull, but in Reade’s hands it is a delight. He possesses a sharp eye for the details of Milton’s verse and his writing crackles with imaginative energy.
Reade is an academic, but his book is mercifully unlike most academic works. It is witty and sardonic ... Reade writes himself into the book, not as a sleuth-researcher nor a lofty pedagogue. He is sensitive and shockable.
Fascinating ... What in Me Is Dark, with its brisk canter over a field as wild and varied as Milton’s own masterpiece, will send readers back to the original text with a new sense of its paradoxes, beauties and continuing relevance.
Admirably lucid ... While it presents its central question concerning the nature of free will as a theological one, Reade points out that its most enduring legacy has always been political.
Lively and humane, Reade is the friendliest of academics ... eade’s more emphatic claims undermine his pluralistic conclusion that Paradise Lost’s strength is the potency of its competing arguments, in line with Milton’s defence of free speech as the surest way to reach the truth.
The readability and economy of Reade’s book is all the more impressive given the sheer amount of information on which his account relies ... The finest and most difficult balance that Reade successfully strikes is between lauding Milton as a rich resource for those in search of inspiration and of freedom, and recognising the abhorrent characteristics of his imagination that have made him amenable to his more repulsive interpreters.
